The Dash

The dash is used in the following cases:

1. to introduce a rephrasing or summary, for example: His family, his education, his business experience — all his background had prepared him for this.

2. to add an afterthought, for example: She was wearing a flowered dress — very odd flowers, I seem to remember.

3. to indicate that the sentence is unfinished, for example: “I don’t really think —”

4. to indicate a sudden break in the line of the sentence, for example:

“He was very — but why go into that?” When reading the dash, we may use an emphatic non-syntactic pause, as in these sentences:

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There are the rarest instances of great works that had im­mediate success — “Hamlet” and “The Importance of Be­ing Earnest”.

A man is never secure. If a man is a man — never. He knew who made his luck — himself. He always pays his debts — if he thinks of it.

The Indented Line

“The content plane of this sign is globality vs. division, that is, presenting something as one whole and establishing a very close connection between its parts or vice versa — breaking it up into parts to make them more prominent and independent”.⁴⁶ As any sign, this punctuation mark possesses a certain expression plane both in speech and in writing.

Obviously the first and the most important parameter to be used when we read a piece of printed text divided into para­graphs is, of course, pausation. We have spoken about pauses for the full stop, the comma, the semicolon, the colon, be­cause all punctuation marks are first and foremost expressed by means of pauses. Now what happens in the case of the in­dented line?

As compared with all other pauses the pause of the indented line is perceptibly longer than that of the full stop; in fact it is the longest of all. But how do we learn to make it perceptibly longer? We know from bitter experience how difficult it is for a beginner to pause in the right places and in the right way. A very useful piece of practical advice is silently to count to three when we have reached the end of a paragraph. This roughly cor­responds to the main, basic measurement of the length of pauses which phonetically is measured in moras (a mora being the aver­age length of one short vowel sound).

As a rule, in addition to perceptibly longer pauses, on the boundary between two paragraphs we observe the modifications of such prosodic parameters as tempo, loudness, and range, as well as lowering the pitch-level at the end of the paragraph. But, of course, tempo and loudness come first. Here is a brief char­acterization of the two: there is a considerable slowing down of

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tempo by the end of the preceding paragraph; the tempo of the next paragraph is generally assumed to increase slightly at the beginning. Loudness (which is very closely connected with tem­po) ’trails down’ by the end of the preceding paragraph, and at the beginning of the next paragraph the process is reversed (one should be very careful not to confound the decrease of loudness with the typical Russian fading):

“The question, used as the title of the present book has been dis- quickly, loudly

cussed time and again, by leading linguists, but, unfortunate­ ly, at long intervals, and apparently without much influence on the actual learning of languages, or linguistic thinking of modern scholars. ||| slowly, softly

How is this unfavourable state of affairs to be accounted for — seeing quickly, loudly

that the general idea was clearly and conclusively formulated so long ago?” slowly, softly

It goes without saying that modifications of tempo and loud-ness at the end of the paragraph are accompanied by lowering the general pitch level.

As far as scientific register is concerned, it is recommendable that the length of the paragraph should not exceed seven or eight lines. For example:

“The inconsistency and subjective character of various lexico­graphic treatments of a word has caused, first of all, the absence of a generally recognized, absolutely sound, faultless methodology of semantic research. Unfortunately there have been too many attempts to solve the problem by mathematical-logical and philo­sophical methods, which too often proved futile in so far as actual lexicography is concerned.

It would have been so much better if the work of the classics of Russian linguistics had been more universally accepted and really understood. Then the practical results of this research would have gone much further and we would have been on the verge of actually arriving at a certain working solution”.

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So far we have mainly concerned ourselves with punctua­tion marks for the so-called “vertical segmentation” of speech: full stop, exclamation mark, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, the indented line. All these punctuation marks have one thing in common: they “segment” the flow of speech vertically, as it were, separating different parts of the sentence or parts of the text.

It has been conclusively shown⁴⁷ that alongside with the al­ready mentioned vertical segmentation, the flow of speech may be divided “horizontally” into different layers: one layer being the author’s own speech, for example, another one — various quotations or various parenthetical insertions that the author in­troduces into his speech with the help of brackets, double com­mas and dashes. It follows that brackets, double commas and dashes, double quotes and single quotes (sometimes referred to as scare quotes) are all used for the “horizontal stratification” of the text.

Scare Quotes vs. Double Quotes

As has already been mentioned above, there exist two kinds ot quotes: double quotes and scare quotes. Double guotes (or quota­tion marks in the proper sense of the word) are used when we actually quote somebody, when what we have written are not our own words. Thus, for example:

1. A full stop “should be used at the end of sentences” ac­cording to Sir Ernest Gowers.

2. He quotes G.M. Young who spoke not of the choice and ar­rangement, but of the “choice and disposition” of words.

The prosodic parameters for double quotes are:

1. a two-unit pause before and after the double quotes,

2. increased loudness,

3. slower tempo. In addition to quotation marks in the full sense of the word

there exist the so-called “scare quotes” when instead of two inverted commas we have one. The semiotics of this punctua­tion mark is quite different. Scare quotes are used to mark off

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something that is not generally recognized, or accepted. It is a kind of red light, danger signal, showing that we are deal­ing with a word (a word-combination) or a term which has no generally accepted definition, which different people use in different meanings. For example:

1. G.W. Turner holds that such thing as ’pure writing’ does not exist.

2. Catherine wondered again as she so often did why it was that the so-called ’well-bread’ people had such very pen­etrating voices. It could not be thought, in these days, that they were accustomed to giving orders to servants.

We can see that scare quotes are usually marking off a term or a word (a word-combination) which is questionable or am­biguous, or used by the author, as it were, provisionally. In French there is a very good formula for scare quotes: “Comme qui dirait” (“As we might say” could be a possible rendering into English; “comme” means “as”, “qui” stands for “who”, “dirait” — for “would say”).

As far as the prosody of scare quotes is concerned,there is no noticeable pause; decreased loudness, slower tempo, and lower part of the diapason are used.

Brackets, Double Comma, Double Dash

Brackets are used to denote additional information, which is not very important as compared with the essential content of the sentence; by means of brackets we usually indicate a reference to a comparatively unimportant afterthought. The prosody of brackets is based on their meaning, which is naturally expressed by lowered pitch-level, decreased loudness, and increased tempo. For example:

The student of English (especially the not very advanced one) will have to concern himself with the important question of acceptability of certain forms from the point of view of the modern reader of speaker.

The second question is whether punctuation marks (including question and exclamation mark) should come before or after the inverted commas that close a quotation.

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You will notice that all the three answers to the question ex­plain (on different levels of abstraction) how an unknown word or thing fits into the general context of known words or things.

Early English grammars (the first appeared in 1586) had been written either to help foreigners learn English or to prepare English students for the study of Latin grammar.

The nature of “double commas” is best understood if we begin with Peškovsky’s definition of them as “weak brackets”. “Double commas” are used mainly to bring out shorter or clicheed inser­tions such as “therefore”, “however”, “also”, “then”, “in other words”, “subsequently”, etc.

We begin by assuming that all our ’thens’ and ’for examples’ are always ’enclosed’ in commas. And so they are — in Russian! According to the rules of Russian punctuation, every inserted bit is marked off by commas. But in English this is not at all a general rule. In English we mark these insertions off by commas (or we do not mark them off by commas) at will. The choice of the one or the other will also depend on the context, the overall rhythm of the utterance, and, of course, no insertion is ever read in such a way as to make the tone rise before and fall after it. Quite often it is mere level tone all along.

Thus, if we ’hear’ a level tone, we do not bring out the in­sertions by means of commas. Or, rather, we should not bring them (insertions) out by means of commas, because so far, many writers do it automatically. The intention of the author should also be taken into account. If, for example, the author wants us to read this or that insertion in such a way as to bring it out, then the insertion will be marked off by commas. For instance:

I want to consider the idea that the subject-matter of Ethics is, so to speak, inherently shifting and unstable because of the phenomenon of social and historical change.

What, then, happens to these words when the analysis is raised to the metasemiotic level?

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The modern poet, for example, may be perfectly justified in using large numbers of unusual words in unusual combinations. This does not mean to say, of course, that we never find exam­ples, or extracts, or passages gleaned from very good writers.

The situation with “double dash” is quite different. First of all, before reading the part marked off by dashes we require a pause, the length of the pause being conditioned by the necessity of drawing the listener’s attention to what will follow.

The second very important point as far as the prosody of dashes is concerned, is that there is no increase of tempo or decrease of loudness as in the case of brackets. On the contrary, the part brought out by means of dashes is read in such a way as to indicate prosodically the importance of the information con­tained therein. For example:

The aim and purpose of the present manual is to provide con­crete material — texts and explanations — which should enable the learner to know what it is he (or she) must regard as the model, the obrazec to be followed as closely as possible when using English professionally.

The correct use of the comma — if there is such a thing as ’correct’ use — can only be acquired by common sense, observa­tion and taste.

The recognition of the undisputed superiority of so many great writers — classics and classical literature — is one of the most general and most firmly established facts.

Words and phrases in apposition are usually — where any punctuation exists — separated by commas.

To sum up what has been said above we would like to re­iterate that the main principle of English punctuation is se­mantic-stylistic. In other words, if we want to punctuate a text properly, we first write it down without punctuation marks. Then we read the text and punctuate it in accordance with our prosody. It goes without saying that whatever variant of the prosodic interpretation of the text we choose, it should reveal to the full the purport of the text.

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Does it follow from what we have explained so far that un­til comparatively recently nothing has been done to bring the written form of speech closer to it oral counterpart? The an­swer is an emphatic ’no’, because different scholars have been devising various systems of tonetic transcription for quite a number of years.

For example, it is common knowledge that some well-known phoneticians (J.D. O’Connor, R. Kingdon) have provided foreign language learners with a lot of useful material on tapes, with various linguaphone courses that have been used very extensively for decades. However, it often happened during the years that Kingdon’s and O’Connor’s materials were accepted uncritically. Their generalizations (The Glide Down, the High Jump, the High Dive) were just learnt by heart.

But only comparatively recently it was fully understood and realized that these phoneticians in actual fact sinned on the side of taking completely apart the oral form of the language and its written form. To them the oral form was a Thing in Itself, a “Ding an sich”. They concentrated entirely on the oral speech. They analysed and investigated it, transcribed and re­peated it, and produced all kinds of pedagogically very use­ful combinations of tunes. But all this was done in a kind of vacuum. In other words, they lived their phonetic life without any regard for the written counterpart of what they were say­ing. Methodologically, this is, of course, quite an unacceptable approach.

Nevertheless, this approach had been there ever since the International Phonetic Association was founded (1886) and linguists (and, especially, language teachers) turned to the sounds, began to teach living languages. And, as it often hap­pens, it lingered on. However, now we know that this separa­tion of the two forms of English is completely unacceptable at the present stage of the development of philology as a science. (Unfortunately, the spirit of more than a hundred years ago still dominates the minds of many teachers of English).

The fact is that until the end of the XIX-th century people concentrated mainly on the analysis of the written form of differ-60

ent languages. But then came the idea that languages should be taught in their spoken form as well. Then all kinds of problems arose (especially for the English language) because of the enor­mous discrepancy between the written form and the pronuncia­tion. That is mainly the reason why all kinds of transcription had been elaborated and remained there for decades, while the spoken language kept changing all the time. Hence the idea of phonetic and phonological transcriptions.

We have already explained to our readers in great detail that if we go by transcriptions, we get nowhere. If we take all imaginable ’Englishes ’ of the world and the way English is spoken in various parts of not only the world but England itself, there would not be any English language without orthography. So, of course, it is not the transcription, but the classical, received orthography which is the English language which stays, which is there for everybody to use, understand and communicate.

It should be understood that it is the standard orthography that is the foundation, and that a philologist gets nowhere un­less he (or she) begins by becoming really proficient in read­ing texts according to the rules of reading and understanding the fact that English orthography is a specific semiotic system (and not an atrocity or nuisance). All the attempts to tran­scribe texts, use all kinds of notation that is elaborated more or less for the nonce lead us nowhere. Nobody is ever going to replace the generally received orthography by a transcription (phonological or any other) simply because then three quarters of the time would be spent changing it, adapting it to actual pronunciation. And nothing could be more protean than actu­al pronunciation. In other words, nothing could change more quickly. And we cannot have protean orthography. As we have already pointed out, it is there to stay, it is something fixed.

If we assume that what we have just said in connection with the segmental level is true, we can try to apply it to the suprasegmental level of our research, which is the main sub­ject of the present chapter. From the methodological point of view all the tonetic transcriptions and notations separate writ­ten speech and oral speech, creating a kind of Chinese Wall between them.⁴⁸

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On the suprasegmental level quite a number of different tonetic transcriptions have been suggested. O.S. Akhmanova and L.V. Minaeva in their joint article “The Babel of Prosodic Representation”⁴⁹ give an overview of the most widely known ones. Here are some of them:

g? n 1. Is thing o some wr

S P E

H N 2. When he O /the girls TALK to Jo

n.

3. He wanted to do it.

02—4 °2—4 °2—4 °2—4

4. ²Well // ²I²think²/²it’d be ²all ³right²/²to ³go 1now¹#

5. He did very nicely I T~>4. simple assertion

X/

assertion with minor reservation

x^r echo question

assertion with major \^;T reservation

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6.

О • • Л • •

it seems impossible

It is quite obvious from the above-adduced examples that all these systems of tonetic transcriptions are purely subjective and are a very far cry from what we actually hear in speech. As we have shown in the present chapter, in the majority of cases there are punctuation marks to guide us through the text and we do not need to have on the same page punctuation marks and tonetic transcription (which is a deplorably common prac­tice in so many books and manuals) that eclipses punctuation marks completely.